Running with Scissors: A Memoir
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- ISBN13: 9780312938857
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is the right tale of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox child psychiatrist who bore a arresting resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs establish himself amidst Victorian dirt living with the doctor’s bizarre family tree, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The tale of an bandit childhood where rules were unheard of, and the Christmas tree stayed up all year-round, where Valium was consumed like candy, and if things got dull, an electroshock therapy machine could provide entertainment. The amusing, upsetting, and bestselling account of an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances
Running with Scissors Acknowledgments
Gratitude doesn’t start to clarify it: Jennifer Enderlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenburg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to prompt my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I want to thank the real-life members of the family tree described in this book for taking me into their home and long-suffering me as one of their own. I admit that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-effective people. The book was not proposed to hurt the family tree. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors. Most of all, I want to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique.
Gratitude doesn’t start to clarify it: Jennifer Enderlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenburg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to prompt my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I want to thank the real-life members of the family tree described in this book for taking me into their home and long-suffering me as one of their own. I admit that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-effective people. The book was not proposed to hurt the family tree. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors. Most of all, I want to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique.
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs’s upsetting and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the leader. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. “I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a spectacle of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor’s office,” he writes, “And it certainly wouldn’t be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours.” There were certainly copious chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist’s eccentric extended family tree, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an ancient electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that ancient table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: preparation a “beauty empire” and performing an a capella version of “You Light Up My Life” at a local mental ward. Burroughs’s perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, amusing but not deliberately comic. And it’s ultimately a feel-excellent tale: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there’s permanently a sense that Burroughs’s survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. –John Moe
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This was a disgusting book. I am too embarrassed to say I bought this garbage let alone tried to read it. Threw it in the trash.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I bought this book for my spouse for Christmas because the reviews were so excellent. I was shocked by the content and I didn’t reflect I was that easily shocked. Both my spouse and I reflect this book is dreadful. Don’t buy it, I will give you our copy.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
As a teacher of young children, some of whom have suffered from severe neglect and abuse, I establish this book offensive. Trivializing traumatic events in the lives of the most vulnerable among us disturbs me. It is only an optimistic scenery that propelled me through this book, hoping for some relief from the constant treachery this boy endured. The dispassionate description of the atrocities and neglect in this boy’s life is frightening. If this guy really lived this life, I am astounded neighbors did not report the whole menagerie to CPS, the police, the medical licensing board, the truancy officer, and anyone I’ve not mentioned who represents the well being of children and mentally ill adults in this society. This is no laugh riot; this is the tale of a child who disassociated himself from the pain of abandonment and abuse. I hope writing this was therapeutic for him, but it didn’t do me any excellent.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
when I read about this tale in Vanity Honest magazine, I was curious to really read it. The leader has to have made up most of what he claims happened during his childhood. It is impossible that what he describes is fact. It is the most disgusting crap I have ever read, and so obvious that he just wanted to make money. But the fact that he would hurt the only family tree he ever really had is pathetic. this reader doesn’t judge a word of it and hope augusten gets what he deserves. I finished the book last night, and this morning, it was place out with the trash!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I despise this book. I find this book really hard to judge. I reflect a lot of it was made up. You may question yourself, “Why is this book so terrible?” This book is so terrible that I don’t feel the need to clarify how terrible it is. So there…
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5